The Conscientious Portfolio Competition has become a tradition on this website, and I’m thrilled to announce this year’s incarnation. The winner(s) will have their work featured on this site, in the form of an extended conversation.

First of all, the Conscientious Portfolio Competition (CPC) is free to enter. There are no costs involved for you other than the time it takes to decide about and send in your work.

CPC is aimed at emerging photographers. We could probably argue about the term “emerging.” What it means here is that photographers not represented by a gallery will get preferential treatment. But of course, the quality of the work plays the most important role.

There are two guest judges joining me this year to determine the winner(s), Alice Rose George and Ann-Christin Bertrand:

Alice Rose George is a New York based independent photography editor, curator, and consultant. She has been the Director of Photography for several magazines including GEO, Fortune, DoubleTake and Granta. She is one of the founders of Here is New York, a photography exhibit in response to September 11. She has been the curator/editor of many books and exhibitions, as well as being an art consultant for many years to a major American photography collector. Currently, teaching in the Univ. of Hartford MFA program in photography, she continues her work with young and upcoming photographers.

Ann-Christin Bertrand is curator for C/O Berlin. She heads the C/O Berlin Talents program, an annual internationally advertised competition for young contemporary photography and art criticism, and has organized collective and individual shows including „Larry Clark“, „Rafal Milach . 7 Rooms“, „Edward Burtynsky . Oil“, as well as „Christer Strömholm . Post Scriptum“. In addition, she organizes the „C/O Berlin Book Days“ and is currently developing the series of public programs „In Transition: Thinking about photography“. After completing her studies in art history, visual arts, literature and media studies, she worked for several years in Paris and Vienna as a curator, art critic and project manager.

CPC happens in two stages. The first stage – where we are now – is the submission stage. Photographers are asked to send in their application via email in the following form:

name

email address

website URL (a proper website: no Flickr, no blogs/Tumblrs)

name of the portfolio/body of work (please do not forget this part – surprisingly often, photographers forget to mention which project they’re submitting)

Send your email to review at jmcolberg.com (you’ll have to replace the “at” with @ and remove the spaces for this to work, of course), subject line “CPC 2013”. One submission per photographer. Please do not submit images or pdfs directly by appending them to the email.

The deadline in 31 October 2013, 11:59pm ET.

If you need a statement for your work, it should be on the website. Your website should have a bio/CV, of course. If you don’t have a website, you will not be able to enter the competition. This might strike you as unfair, but every serious photographer should have her/his own dedicated website.

From the pool of submissions, 25 candidates will be picked for the second round. The photographers in this pool will receive an email, and they will have to send in ten jpeg images, in a uniform format (size etc.).

This is where Alice and Ann-Christin will come in. They will each pick their personal favourite from the pool of 25. I will pick one, too. Here’s the twist: There will be three or two winners, or maybe just one, if a photographer is picked more than once.

Having a second round is based on the idea of making everything as equal as possible. With uniform file sizes, fancy websites won’t be able to beat out simple ones. With a special naming convention for the jpegs (which will hide the full names), the winner will be solely chosen based on the quality of the work.

The winner(s) of the competition will have their work featured on this website, in the form of an extended conversation.